


Le Bien-aimé

by oubliance



Category: A Place of Greater Safety - Hilary Mantel
Genre: Corporal Punishment, M/M, Non-specific implications of underage sexual activity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-27
Updated: 2012-12-27
Packaged: 2017-11-22 15:44:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 658
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/611475
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oubliance/pseuds/oubliance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Louis-le-Grand: the year is 1775, as will probably be apparent from the other thing on Maximilien’s mind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Le Bien-aimé

You practise it again: last night you dreamt it. Your phantasm was perfect down to the inflections, and without sweat. Lack of skin set the words free. Inside the formula was something more like a shout: they were beginning to hear (he and she) when the bell threw its early noise, you woke, and Camille’s bed again was empty.

Absent all day: not washing, dressing. Not fidgeting at dinner, irritating Louis by a wilful refusal to say a word in French.

When Camille feels Grecian, he – none of that, he is not here. No need to cajole: no ear to take it in.

You are not a philosopher and have performed no scientific comparisons. Camille’s hair is all you have touched – but for your own sandy bristles, which require discipline, not love. Yet the fact is: he carries the palm. You are confident in this matter. One can judge by sight; more importantly the quality of a thing shows in its exterior habiliments, sometimes. His incapability is a vast but lamentable stroke of good fortune to you: lamentable because Camille is still a child despite his best endeavours.

Absent all day: even from his Greek, Louis says. He enjoys it because of Father Simonet, here for one term only. Father Simonet is built more for prize-fighting than scholarship. He never asks Camille an ordinary question – what, after all, would be the point? You know this, Louis knows, all the school knows.

Camille never brings his private work along. His black eyes follow Father Simonet back and forth across the front of the room as he teaches; the lessons are full of energy.

Occasionally, the master relents: he bullies Camille into speaking, although all the others gave up when Camille conducted his little campaign. It worked almost too well. But Father Simonet insists that he say four lines of his own translation, whatever he is working on: almost weeping, Camille stammers them.

Afterwards he will come to find you, and the two of you wait together for it to be tolerable once more. You have noticed that the cheek-skin is softer yet when tears have washed it. Cold face, small face, striped with a shame that is also the only comfort to be had: warmth of weeping.

And why would he absent himself from Father Simonet?

O vous, qui étes le bien-aimé de mon ame, apprenez-moi où vous menez praître votre troupeau, où vous vous reposez à midi, de peur que je ne m’égare en suivant les troupeaux de vos compagnons. Yes, Camille likes it in every language. On that score he does not discriminate. Not knowing where he is: this might make it hard to concentrate, but you know all the words.

If he is lying unidentified in the Hôtel-Dieu – which is not impossible, the curls astray, the violet eye-lids stilled. Highest majesty. The honour of this day. For the first time in three weeks’ practice, you err.

‘Camille is being beaten,’ says Rabbit without sarcasm at your elbow. His words are not for a person he despises but for somebody who speaks Camille fluently: and that is what you do. It would not be overstating things to call it your talent in life, as far as life has run.

You refrain from questions: he cannot answer them now. Camille’s thin skin is a literal matter and does him no favours. Blood is drawn infallibly: since he can do nothing with it, you have to. If he would not go out into the city merely to spare you this? Your composure is intact: it would be cruel to scare him. The heat of tears brings a pinkness into his jaw where the curving bone is like a marble angel’s. He lies on his side and they rush, rush. The thing about punishments is this: they do not stop.

Que vous étes beau, mon bien-aimé! Que vous avez de graces et de charmes! Nôtre lit est couvert de fleurs.

**Author's Note:**

> Seeming errors in biblical quotation derive from my use of an eighteenth-century translation. Simonet is an OC.
> 
>  
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> [](http://www.tracemyip.org/)  
> 


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